Inside the computer lab at Amelia Earhart Elementary, students are busily working at computers to finish their digital book reports. Headphones on, they are focused on their work. While you can feel the excitement in the room, the only sound is the continuous tapping of fingers on the keyboard.

This isn’t taking place in the cold of a Midwestern February, this is happening Miami, Florida, where the ocean breeze and sandy beaches are calling. This isn’t a gifted class either; it’s a group of struggling readers attending summer school before entering third grade. The students are motivated, and the classroom is buzzing due to an engaging summer school curriculum called Zoom In, Zoom Out.

Time is in short supply and budgets are tight, but the staff in the Instructional Technology department at Miami-Dade County Public Schools found a creative way to foster technology integration. Dr. Sylvia Diaz and her staff responded to a request for proposals for summer school courses with an innovative curriculum that engaged struggling readers and writers, and provided tools and training for the teachers leading the classes.

A recent introduction to digital microscopes provided the spark for Maureen Cooling as she designed the curriculum. Knowing that summer school students are often strong visual learners, she felt imaging tools would provide a great catalyst for students to read stories and complete activities on the topics they encountered while reading. These visual experiences would then help them weave their own stories. Revolving around the books Miss Rumphius and Thunder Cake, this innovative curriculum partnered reading with activities using digital cameras, Google Earth, and ImageBlender.

After reading about Miss Rumphius, for example, students used digital microscopes to explore the growth of radish seeds, learning about plants and their life cycles. Using paper towels and water to “plant” their seeds, students took pictures of the seeds every day with the digital microscopes and then wrote about the seed’s growth in their journals.

Miss Rumphius’s travels and the origin of the spices used in baking the thunder cake provided a connection to locations and cultures around the world, which they visited virtually with Google Earth. Students created personalized postcards and stories from these locations, using ImageBlender to add their photographs, as well as the magnified images of spices they had taken.

The strong technology component also helped to ensure a very high level of attendance. It was rare for students to miss even one day of the summer institute. The teachers loved a summer employment experience where they were both “challenged and interested,” shares Julie Tuttle.

Myriam Garcia, a reading teacher at Earhart Elementary, had worked with the instructional technology team in the past and jumped at the opportunity, though she had not taught a summer session in years. “I can’t believe they are paying me to do this,” she whispered to her principal after one especially successful day.

Myriam’s summer school experience provided additional strategies she used to reach her students. Myriam teaches retained students, as well as students who are diagnosed with ADHD and other learning disorders, but have not been formally tested. Having ADHD herself, she knew that these students would not respond to traditional teaching and that lectures would never work.

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